The old proverb, that "the pitcher which goes often to the well returns
broken at last," receives, in the lives of railroad men, frequent
confirmation. I have known some men who have run engines for fifteen
or twenty years and met with no accident worthy of note to themselves,
their trains, or to any of the passengers under their charge; but if
they continue running, the iron hand of fate will surely reach them.
Old Stephen Hanford, or "Old Steve," as he is called by everybody
who knows him, had been running engines for twenty-five years, with
an exemption from the calamities, the smash-ups and break-downs,
collisions, etc., that usually checker the life of an engineer, that
was considered by everybody most remarkable. Night and day, in rain,
snow and mist, he has driven his engine on over flood and field, and
landed his passengers safely at their journey's end, always. No matter
how hard the storm blew, with sharp forked lightnings, with muttering
thunders, and the pitiless, driving rain, Old Steve's engine, which
from its belching smoke and eating fire seemed the demon of the storm,
came in safe, and the old man, whose eye never faltered, whose vigil
never relaxed, got off from his engine, and after seeing it safely
housed, went to his home, not to dream of the terrors and miseries
of collisions, of the shrieks and groans of victims whom his engine
had trodden down and crushed with tread as resistless as the rush of
mountain torrents. No; all these saddening reflections were spared
him, for he had never had charge of an engine when any fatal accident
happened. Old Steve was one of the most careful men on an engine that I
ever saw. He was always on the watch, and was active as a cat. Nothing
escaped his watchful glance, and in any emergency his presence of mind
never forsook him; he went at once to doing the right thing, and did it
quickly.
The old man's activity never diminished in the least, but his eyesight
grew weak, and he thought he would leave the main line, and, like an
old war-horse, in his latter days be rid of the hurry-skurry of the
road. So he took a switch engine in the yard at Rochester and worked
there, leaving the fast running in which he delighted to his younger
comrades, many of whom received their first insight to the business
from Old Steve. He had been there about a year at work, very well
contented with his position, a little outside of the great whirling
current of the road on which he had so long labored, and was one day
standing beside his engine, almost as old a stager as himself, when
with an awful crash the boiler exploded. Old Steve was not hurt by
the explosion, but he started back so suddenly that he fell upon the
other track, up which another engine was backing; the engineer of
which, startled, no doubt, by the explosion, did not see the old man,
until too late, and the wheels passed over him, crushing his leg off,
just above the knee. They picked him up and carried him home; "the
pitcher had been often to the well,"--it was broken at last. Owing to
his vigorous constitution, the shock did not kill him; the leg was
amputated, and now, should you ever be in the depot at Rochester, you
will most likely see Old Steve there, hobbling around on one leg and a
pair of crutches, maimed, indeed, but as cheerful as ever. He said to
me, "I am used up, but what right had I to expect any thing else? In
twenty-five years I have bidden good-bye to many a comrade, who, in the
same business, met the stern fate which will most surely catch us all
if we stick to the iron horse."